


hints of gladness

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, Established Relationship, Fillory (The Magicians), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-08-23 20:27:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20214181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: Quentin and Eliot spend a night under Fillorian stars.





	hints of gladness

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [all our unwanted pieces left under the ice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18773254) by [patrokla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla). 

> This is a deleted Mosaic flashback from all our unwanted pieces left under the ice. It didn't quite work in the new chapter, but I liked it, so I'm putting it up here. You don't need to have read that fic to understand this - basically it's just Eliot remembering the Mosaic years. 
> 
> Title and epigraphs from Mary Oliver's "When I Am Among Trees."
> 
> Warning for a brief reference to past abuse in the first paragraph.

_When I am among the trees, _  
_especially the willows and the honey locust,_  
_equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines, _  
_they give off such hints of gladness._

_I would almost say that they save me, and daily._

\--

Eliot valiantly resists the urge to drink before dinner. It’s easy; he’s tired of being unbearably fucking hungover. It’s hard; his body aches like it hasn’t since he lived with someone willing to beat the shit out of him whenever provoked by his existence. He slumps his forehead against a cold, cold windowpane and doesn’t let his mind wander. Doesn’t let himself think about anything other than the feeling of the glass as it warms slightly, and the way his breath condenses against it like a bird, impacting.  
  
Margo had said that the castle would get colder, and he fancies he can feel the chill settling in completely. It’s a serious oversight of the castle’s construction, that it seems to retain so little heat. Although it might just be the Long Winter. Now that he thinks on it, he’s never wintered in Whitespire, not for a full season. He’d spent most of a summer there, during the fairy occupation, but that had been so completely interrupted by the Mosaic that it’s impossible for him to consider even that year as just one year. How could it be, when he’d spent fifty springs, summers, autumns, and winters in Fillory in a single day?  
  
It's that thought, the thought of how much _time_ he'd had that he may never have again, that makes him shiver and succumb. He lets his memories run loose, tearing him away from the idea like wolfhounds. He remembers the way the leaves had changed color with the seasons. He’d grown attuned to the trees in the forest surrounding the cottage. _Their_ cottage.

\--  
  
Quentin had always paid attention to the trees like he noticed everything in Fillory, with curiosity verging on wonder, and, more rarely, with satisfaction. He liked it when details lined up with what Plover had written, if only because it meant that he _knew_. Quentin liked to know things.  
  
“They sort of share experiences, in the books,” he’d told Eliot one night, in the summer of their second year. “There was a theory that it was him having a bone to pick with Tolkien and the Ents, like Tolkien did with elves and Shakespeare, but I always thought - oh, don’t make that face. You have to know what Ents are.”  
  
“I’ll tell you right now, I never read those books,” Eliot warns him, and Quentin widens his eyes in mock horror, then laughs at him.  
  
“I just sort of assume that, at this point,” he says, and there's no judgment in his tone, just a hint of excitement that he might be able to tell the story to Eliot himself, some night when they're bored.  
  
“But you were saying about the trees?”  
  
“Oh, right! Right, so according to the books, the trees in Fillory are like, not very individual or mobile? They sort of have a hivemind, almost, but a little more localized.”  
  
“Tree families,” Eliot interprets, and Quentin smiles at him.  
  
“Right, tree families! And you can tell which ones are connected because they react to changes in the same way. Anything from the weather to what the people around them are doing. The books have a lot of descriptions of like, the glittering red-gold leaves of the aspens surrounding Lake Descent.”  
  
“Is that a direct quote?” Eliot asks, raising an eyebrow, and Quentin only flushes a little as he says, “Maybe.”  
  
He goes quiet after that, but not in a bad way. Eliot knows the bad ways, learns them more with every day that passes at the Mosaic. There’d been a string of bad quiet days, last month, where the few times Quentin had met his eyes, he’d been - not quite there. At a distance just far enough away to be visible.  
  
But today's been a good day, and Eliot watches Quentin as he shifts to lay on his back and look up at the stars.  
  
“The stars here are different,” he remarks, after a moment. “I mean, obviously. Not our constellations.”  
  
“No,” Eliot agrees, and he shifts as well, mirroring Quentin. “I’m surprised you can tell that, city boy.”  
  
“I read books!” Quentin says, glancing over at Eliot like that explains everything.

It does. Quentin loves to read. The first time they'd ever made the trek to the nearby village to trade, it'd been for food. The second time, it'd been for the books Quentin had eyed longingly in the market. They'd exchanged spellwork for the books, Eliot enchanting the bookseller's cart to be impervious to rain, and Quentin mending the worn soles of his boots. The bookseller had given them a cookbook with wooden covers, a slight but beautifully illustrated volume of poetry, and an extremely tattered German edition of _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. _

"Haven't had anyone who could read the language, but something tells me you two might know it," the bookseller had said, and Quentin had just nodded, his eyes fixed on the cover illustration of two children standing behind a statue of an angel. 

Later, when they got home - although it'd still been "the cottage" then, both Quentin and Eliot talking around the idea of permanence, or anything that suggested they might be there a long time - later, he tells Eliot about how his dad had read him the book when he'd gotten chickenpox in fourth grade, and how he and Julia had pretended to be Claudia and Jamie sometimes, when they hid from (Quentin's) bullies.

Eliot's thinking of that moment, of Quentin's openness, and the way he holds the book with loving care, when he confesses into the quiet, "I always liked the stars. We didn't have trees, because -" he lets the unspoken words, _because it was a farm in Indiana_, float away, knowing Quentin already knows them, then continues. "I used to watch them at night to remind myself that the world was bigger than just the cornfields. That it all goes on forever..."  
  
He trails off then, slightly embarrassed and feeling vulnerable, exposed to the night sky and the gaze of every star.

“That’s what I thought, anyway,” he says, sitting up. “I was a kid.”

When he looks over at Quentin, he finds him looking back intently, his dark eyes focused on Eliot and only Eliot.  
  
“You were right,” Quentin says, sounding strangely fierce. “The world is bigger than just fields. And it could go on forever, you’ve seen the Neitherlands. It’s just fountains for miles and miles.”  
  
“Right," Eliot laughs. "Miles and miles of worlds and we’re living on a tenth of an acre.”  
  
“Feels bigger,” Quentin shrugs, “Also, I have no idea how big an acre is.”  
  
“I assume that, at this point,” Eliot says teasingly, and that makes Quentin roll his eyes and get up just so he can push Eliot over, onto his back again, and straddle his thighs.  
  
They end up fucking like that, frotting until Quentin comes with Eliot’s name on his lips, pink and satisfied in the dark. Then Quentin wraps a hand around him, and Eliot ends up trapped between his earnest gaze and the indecipherable twinkling of foreign stars. He's never been opposed to sex outdoors, but this night it’s too much, the way everything has weight, so much so that it’s a relief when Quentin bends down to kiss him and blocks his view of the sky. Afterwards, Quentin rolls off of him, but stays closer than he had been, close enough that their hands are brushing.  
  
Eliot does read on occasion, and he’s read about how small the stars can make people feel. Insignificant, against the backdrop of the universe. He doesn’t feel like that, not tonight. He feels immense, vital. Like he and Quentin are the only real things, the focal point around which everything spins. When Quentin twitches his fingers awkwardly against Eliot’s, he tangles them together without speaking. Eliot lets the touch anchor him as he breathes, imagining more than feeling Quentin's pulse thrumming against his skin.

In the morning, they'll wake to see that the leaves of the trees around them have paled from green to lavender. Quentin will smile at this like it means something, but he won't tell Eliot why, not at first. Eliot will watch him lay tiles, and think about how to persuade the information out of him, and they'll spend the next night out under the stars, and the next, and the next...

\--

_Around me the trees stir in their leaves_  
_and call out, “Stay awhile.”_

_The light flows from their branches._  
_ And they call again, “It’s simple,”_  
_ they say, “and you, too, have come_  
_ into the world to do this, to go easy,_  
_to be filled with light, and to shine.”_


End file.
